Opportunity: Northside Rising – Collective Impact Research & Evaluation Lead
Location: North Sydney, Nova Scotia
Structure: Open to individuals, consultants, organizations
Starting Date: As soon as possible and no later than November 30, 2018

Background
The community of the ‘Northside’, a group neighbourhoods and former towns located on the north side of Sydney harbour within the Cape Breton Regional Municipality on Cape Breton Island is currently in the early phases of a growing community led initiative. An extensive community engagement effort in 2017 resulted in the decision to direct local action to take on the large and growing problem of addiction. Broadly, the initiative seeks to mitigate the causes of addiction, improve the delivery of addiction services and harm reduction techniques. The goal is breaking the cycle of addiction and so reduce or eliminate many ill effects it creates in the individuals and community fabric of the Northside. The actors working together to achieve this goal include residents with lived experience, a local support team, not-for-profits, government and business.

Residents and community have named this initiative Northside Rising to reflect the geographic area of the Northside and their collective desire ‘Rise Again’ as a healthy, whole community.

Northside Rising is using a Collective Impact approach to tackle complex social issues that cannot be resolved by working alone. Rather, the Collective Impact approach is designed from the principle that it will take the shared knowledge, experience and expertise of residents, government, not-for-profits and businesses working together, at the same table, to identify and try new approaches to tackle complex social and population challenges.

Northside Rising is integrated within a larger provincial initiative called Inspiring Communities, also designed to address complex social and population issues in other priority communities across Nova Scotia. Ongoing collaboration is taking place with the Inspiring Communities teams to ensure the ongoing sharing of learnings, data, resources and other assets that can strengthen new ways of working together.

Northside Rising is committed to the evaluation of the effectiveness of this Collective Impact effort as both the theory of change and the framework to guide the processes, support a new culture of working together, take action, learn and adapt. With this in mind, Northside Rising is seeking skilled, experienced and committed professional support to the ongoing evaluation and research for this initiative.